L: British Columbia forest fire drawn by Melaina at 8-years-old; R: Voting in 2020

Fire, Flood and Fury: Voting for the Climate

I am in the first generation to grow up in the climate crisis. My environmentalist journey began with fire.
United States, Northern America

Story by Melaina Dyck. Edited by Joost Backer, Mira Kinn and Rick Scherpenhuizen
Published on November 29, 2020. Reading time: 5 minutes

This story is also available in de es ir it ru tr



When I think of presidential elections, I think of ash.

On November 9, 2016, I woke up in a daze, exhausted from the devastation of the night before.[1] The first sensation I noticed was the acrid smell of smoke. I stepped outside of my tiny, ground-floor apartment in Columbia, South Carolina into an ashy haze. The air was thick with burned particles of forest from the western part of the state, blown in to accompany the honking pick-up trucks charging around town with celebratory ‘make America great again’ flags flapping off their bumpers.

What kind of cosmic joke is this? I thought. Wildfires aren’t supposed to happen in South Carolina.[2]

Fall 2016 was the second-to-last semester of my Bachelor’s in Environmental Science. I was a student of the climate crisis and of its political entanglements. Hurricanes brought massive flooding to Columbia all four of years that I lived there, along with evacuees from the coast further east. While intergenerational neighborhoods were disbanded by floodwaters and families lost property passed down since Emancipation,[3] politicians in the state capital of Columbia refused to even use the term ‘sea level rise’.[4] Now, the west of the state burned as the east flooded and Columbia filled with impromptu parades celebrating the election of a climate denier. My despair and disappointment kindled a steady rage that has burned since that day.

Fittingly, my environmentalist journey began with fire.

Growing up, I spent summers in British Columbia (BC), Canada. When I was eight years old, pine beetles ravaged BC’s forests, leaving swaths of dead trees. Those dry forests were tinder boxes and that summer fires swept the region. One night, my Dad and my Uncle took me to a hillside to look across a lake at a similar hillside engulfed in flames. It terrified me. I also wondered what could be done about those beetles.

In high school, I learned that by 2020 hurricanes would be more numerous, massive and wet, while wildfires burned all year—if we did nothing. But 2020 was ten years away, and the adults would do something, I was sure.

On election night 2020, I sat outside with a campfire—providing warmth to my friend and I on a chilly November evening. We shared our nervous anticipation outdoors because with COVID-19 cases rising, it was not safe to be indoors with friends. We checked the electoral map constantly, hoping more states would turn blue for Democrat and fewer red for Republican. But, as the campfire died, the map burned redder.

November 4, 2020, dawned clear, but uncertainty hung over everything like the ash of four years earlier. Over the next few days, votes were counted and the map turned just blue enough. In 2020, for the first time, US voters elected a candidate with a robust climate plan.[5]

I am in the first generation to grow up in the climate crisis. For me, elections are about fires and ash, hurricanes and floods. My anger is ignited by the political failures that brought us to this point of crisis. I do not trust the politicians to deliver on their plans. Yet, when the 2020 election was finally called, I felt a puff of hope on the November breeze. This too fans the flame. There is work to do.


[1] On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

[2] Scroll down to ‘2016’ for information about the largest wildfire in South Carolina history, which burned the day after the 2016 election: https://www.state.sc.us/forest/firesign.htm#:~:text=The%20largest%20mountain%20wildfire%20on,was%20controlled%20on%20December%2016.

[3] Emancipation refers to the end of slavery in the United States, declared by the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862.

[4] Sea level rise is flooding many coastal communities in South Carolina. Among those hit first and hardest are black neighborhoods, including those whose families have passed property down since the end of slavery. Some such properties fall under ‘heir’s property’ ownership, in which land has been passed down over generations without a legal will. Heir’s property is often excluded from government support to recover or move away from flooding and sea level rise, resulting in the loss of wealth, as well as community connections. For more information see: Heir’s Property Retention Coalition; Southern Environmental Law Center Broken Ground podcast, especially episode ‘Uprooted’; Charleston Post & Courier Sea Level Rise and Land Slipping Away.

[5] For more details, read Biden’s climate plan  and listen to ‘How 2020 Became a climate election’ from the How to Save a Planet podcast.


How does this story make you feel?

Follow-up

Do you have any questions after reading this story? Do you want to follow-up on what you've just read? Get in touch with our team to learn more! Send an email to
[email protected].

Talk about this Story

Please enable cookies to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Share your story

Every story we share is another perspective on a complex topic like migration, gender and sexuality or liberation. We believe that these personal stories are important to better understand what's going on in our globalised society - and to better understand each other. That's because we are convinced that the more we understand about each other, the easier it will be for us to really talk to one another, to get closer - and to maybe find solutions for the issues that affect us all. 

Do you want to share your story? Then have a look here for more info.

Share Your Story

Subscribe to our Monthly Newsletter

Stay up to date with new stories on Correspondents of the World by subscribing to our monthly newsletter:

* indicates required

Follow us on Social Media

Melaina Dyck

Melaina Dyck

Melaina is passionate about the power of stories in order to create connection. Personally and professionally, she driven by the desire to meet people and learn new perspectives.

With a Masters in Environmental Science, Melaina works at the intersection of human rights and environmental issues, advocating for communities whose stories are not always heard. Melaina has had the opportunity to travel, live and study in 11 countries (so far!). 

Melaina enjoys the challenging art of editing and writing. She is Correspondents of the World Senior Editor and USA Country Manager. Correspondents of the World combines several of her favourite things: learning from diverse perspectives, connecting with people all over the world, and working with words to tell stories.

Send her an email ([email protected]) if you’d like to chat. She looks forward to meeting you! 

Topic: Environment




Get involved

At Correspondents of the World, we want to contribute to a better understanding of one another in a world that seems to get smaller by the day - but somehow neglects to bring people closer together as well. We think that one of the most frequent reasons for misunderstanding and unnecessarily heated debates is that we don't really understand how each of us is affected differently by global issues.

Our aim is to change that with every personal story we share.

Share Your Story

Community Worldwide

Correspondents of the World is not just this website, but also a great community of people from all over the world. While face-to-face meetings are difficult at the moment, our Facebook Community Group is THE place to be to meet other people invested in Correspondents of the World. We are currently running a series of online-tea talks to get to know each other better.

Join Our Community

EXPLORE TOPIC Environment

Global Issues Through Local Eyes

We are Correspondents of the World, an online platform where people from all over the world share their personal stories in relation to global development. We try to collect stories from people of all ages and genders, people with different social and religious backgrounds and people with all kinds of political opinions in order to get a fuller picture of what is going on behind the big news.

Our Correspondents

At Correspondents of the World we invite everyone to share their own story. This means we don't have professional writers or skilled interviewers. We believe that this approach offers a whole new perspective on topics we normally only read about in the news - if at all. If you would like to share your story, you can find more info here.

Share Your Story

Our Editors

We acknowledge that the stories we collect will necessarily be biased. But so is news. Believing in the power of the narrative, our growing team of awesome editors helps correspondents to make sure that their story is strictly about their personal experience - and let that speak for itself.

Become an Editor

Vision

At Correspondents of the World, we want to contribute to a better understanding of one another in a world that seems to get smaller by the day - but somehow neglects to bring people closer together as well. We think that one of the most frequent reasons for misunderstanding and unnecessarily heated debates is that we don't really understand how each of us is affected differently by global issues.

Our aim is to change that with every personal story we share.

View Our Full Vision & Mission Statement

Topics

We believe in quality over quantity. To give ourselves a focus, we started out to collect personal stories that relate to our correspondents' experiences with six different global topics. However, these topics were selected to increase the likelihood that the stories of different correspondents will cover the same issues and therefore illuminate these issues from different perspectives - and not to exclude any stories. If you have a personal story relating to a global issue that's not covered by our topics, please still reach out to us! We definitely have some blind spots and are happy to revise our focus and introduce new topics at any point in time. 

Environment

Discussions about the environment often center on grim, impersonal figures. Among the numbers and warnings, it is easy to forget that all of these statistics actually also affect us - in very different ways. We believe that in order to understand the immensity of environmental topics and global climate change, we need the personal stories of our correspondents.

Gender and Sexuality

Gender is the assumption of a "normal". Unmet expectations of what is normal are a world-wide cause for violence. We hope that the stories of our correspondents will help us to better understand the effects of global developments related to gender and sexuality, and to reveal outdated concepts that have been reinforced for centuries.

Migration

Our correspondents write about migration because it is a deeply personal topic that is often dehumanized. People quickly become foreigners, refugees - a "they". But: we have always been migrating, and we always will. For millions of different reasons. By sharing personal stories about migration, we hope to re-humanize this global topic.

Liberation

We want to support the demand for justice by spotlighting the personal stories of people who seek liberation in all its different forms. Our correspondents share their individual experiences in creating equality. We hope that for some this will be an encouragement to continue their own struggle against inequality and oppression - and for some an encouragement to get involved.

Education

Education is the newest addition to our themes. We believe that education, not only formal but also informal, is one of the core aspects of just and equal society as well as social change. Our correspondents share their experiences and confrontations about educational inequalities, accessibility issues and influence of societal norms and structures. 

Corona Virus

2020 is a year different from others before - not least because of the Corona pandemic. The worldwide spread of a highly contagious virus is something that affects all of us in very different ways. To get a better picture of how the pandemic's plethora of explicit and implicit consequences influences our everyday life, we share lockdown stories from correspondents all over the world.

Growing Fast

Although we started just over a year ago, Correspondents of the World has a quickly growing community of correspondents - and a dedicated team of editors, translators and country managers.

94

Correspondents

113

Stories

57

Countries

433

Translations

Contact

Correspondents of the World is as much a community as an online platform. Please feel free to contact us for whatever reason!

Message Us

Message on WhatsApp

Call Us

Joost: +31 6 30273938